Is TC Pipelines, LP (TCP) A Good Stock to Buy?

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The worries about the election and the ongoing uncertainty about the path of interest-rate increases have been keeping investors on the sidelines. Of course, most hedge funds and other asset managers have been underperforming main stock market indices since the middle of 2015. Interestingly though, smaller-cap stocks registered their best performance relative to the large-capitalization stocks since the end of the June quarter, suggesting that this may be the best time to take a cue from their stock picks. In fact, the Russell 2000 Index gained more than 15% since the beginning of the third quarter, while the Standard and Poor’s 500 benchmark returned less than 6%. This article will lay out and discuss the hedge fund and institutional investor sentiment towards TC Pipelines, LP (NYSE:TCP).

TC Pipelines, LP (NYSE:TCP) shares didn’t see a lot of action during the third quarter. Overall, hedge fund sentiment was unchanged. The stock was in 6 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September, same as at the end of June. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as NuStar Energy L.P. (NYSE:NS), Colfax Corp (NYSE:CFX), and Ternium S.A. (ADR) (NYSE:TX) to gather more data points.

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs.

QiuJu Song/Shutterstock.com

QiuJu Song/Shutterstock.com

How have hedgies been trading TC Pipelines, LP (NYSE:TCP)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 6 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, unchanged from the second quarter of 2016. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish positions in TCP over the last 5 quarters, which peaked at 8 at the end of March. So, let’s find out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

HedgeFundSentimentChart

When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, holds the biggest position in TC Pipelines, LP (NYSE:TCP). Renaissance Technologies has a $10.4 million position in the stock. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is William Michaelcheck of Mariner Investment Group which holds a $4.1 million position; 2.1% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Other members of the smart money that are bullish contain Stephen J. Errico’s Locust Wood Capital Advisers, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, and George Hall’s Clinton Group. We should note that none of these hedge funds are among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds, which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-micro-cap stocks.

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